From SomethingJones over on SA
Star Citizen: Around the Verse
Nov 16, 2017
Todd Papy Game Design
"...and making sure that we can refine that to as small of a list and as concise of a list as what we would consider a MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT, to put that out to PTU and to live"
Jake Ross Producer, Texas, since 2014
"...we're gonna review that process, hopefully get a minimal amount of feedback so we can get super close to calling this thing FEATURE COMPLETE"
Robert Gaither ex QA 1 year, Associate Tech Designer 1 year, Texas
"...also we've got all sorts of art that had rotations all over the place, we had to go back and make sure that everything was placed properly on the shelves and that we're having all the FINAL STUFF in the game, all the FINAL ASSETS in the build"
Robert Reininger Senior Tech Designer, 1y 4mo, Texas
"...definitely been challenges going through this, SHOPKEEPERS has been... you know... that's generally our first usage of the SUBSUMPTION engine in general, so getting to know that has been a challenge, the shopkeepers... although... what you're going to see is fairly simple compared to the overall AI you're gonna see, ah... in the LONG RUN is... still just a good learning experience just for us... ahm... getting... getting... some of the other bugs worked out of the system, you know, INTERACTIONS with objects, getting the camera to sit right on the thing you're trying to focus on and trying on... things like that, it's kinda dialing in the knobs so to speak... it's taken its toll and taken its time"
Ashram Kain Technologist, Producer, 1y 4mo, LA
"Interestingly this week we've had to deal with a number of bugs related to how we do occlusion in the cargo grids, for instance if you were to store a ship in your cargo bay, how do we fill up boxes around that ship so we don't block you so you can't keep the ship there BUT still give you the option of storing cargo inside your ship? It's been very interesting stuff"
Janine Irmler Production assistant, Frankfurt 1y 7mo (previously HR for various companies)
"So what has happened recently is that we transitioned from doing SPRINTS to doing WEEKLY REVIEWS to close out the work for missions for 3.0. We already have a lot of missions available in Evocati (note- there are only 5 missions in Evocati right now) but there are a few still missing so what we are doing is, um... wrapping up the outstanding missions and tasks... which we take through JIRA. So the team is working through the outstanding JIRA lists and to keep it organised we define the FOCUS at the beginning of each week as well as which missions we want to review and we are doing the review at the end of each week. This means that we are also doing daily THINGS to ensure we stay on top of BLOCKERS and any issues that could arise, and also to track progress.
Additionally to the reviews we are also doing PLAYTHROUGHS where... DIRECTORS or LEADS for example can experience the missions themselves, they can play them for themselves and provide additional feedback to the team as well on top of the reviews we have... so... this feedback... we get ALL THE FEEDBACK and it really helps the team to improve and balance the missions further.
This is where we are, we have made lots of progress doing all these REVIEWS and PLAYTHROUGHS and now we're just closing out the LAST BITS so we anticipate to be FEATURE COMPLETE in the very near future"
Luke Pressley ex Crytek, Lead Live Design 3y 10mo, UK
"This week we've been focussing on taking the rest of our missions to FINAL, we've got 7 more taken to FEATURE COMPLETE and I think that leaves us with only 4 more to take there, and we're close."
Matthew Lightfoot ex DayZ/Arma, Associate Producer 2y, UK
"Some of the focuses of the IFCS team was supporting the AI team with bugfixing and spline following, so we've managed to close out quite a few bugs now, we've got one left, which is going to extend to next week and before John can start on the spline following tasks"
John Pritchett Senior Physics Programmer, LA, since 2013
"I'm out here at Foundry 42 so that I can work with Andrew Nicholson (Tech Designer, UK, 1y-ish) and David Colson (junior gameplay programmer, 5mo, UK) on FLIGHT MODEL, so helping out with the TUNING and helping David work on... he's.... he's... been working WITH me recently so he's working on the GRAV-LEV SYSTEM and optimising IFCS and things like that"
Andrew Nicholson Tech Designer, 1y-ish, UK
So last week we managed to complete... I managed to complete a complete pass on the ship tunings for the FCM, velocities, to make things a little faster, it took a LONG time to get through all those ships but I'm really pleased with how that's worked out. This week the focus is the GRAV-LEV simulation for the HOVERBIKES and ATMOSPHERIC TUNINGS and the drag simulation in atmospheric flight.
David Colson Junior Gameplay Programmer, 5mo, UK
We've discovered a little bit before we went to Evocati last week, we found that every so often the ships would just loose control, you would roll and yaw to one side and the PLANE would just start spinning and you weren't able to recover very easily. And we quickly discovered that some PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS that were added a few days earlier CAUSED this issue, we weren't exactly sure why but we needed to release to Evocati so we REMOVED the performance improvements which fixed the ships loosing control but, you know, we still wanted these performance improvements so I went back a couple of days later and took a deeper look at these performance improvements and discovered that, you know, I'd made a mistake and there was some... um... FORCE COUPLES in the way the ship rotates that weren't balanced very well as a result of the performance improvements and it meant that the ship tried to make some manoevures it wasn't balanced and it would just uncontrollably SPIN and not be able to get out."
Leo Vansteenkiste ex-Junior Gameplay Programmer 1y, Gameplay Programmer 1y, UK
"Last week on the (Mobiglass) starmap was quite alright, there are still a few issue where we lost the input and we had a few crashes, those have been fixed. The crashes were kind of hard to fix because they are kind of random"
Mark White Production Assistant 2y, UK
"On the starmap we've been doing the last few bugfixes, on Thursday or Friday last week we got it to a point where we're now happy with it on the UI side so that's now this morning gone over to Todd, Todd's viewed it this morning, he's just sent over a list of 5 or 6 bugs. So now we're going to estimate those, get them into the schedule. Once those bugs are done again we'll go back to Todd and hopefully that'll be it and it'll be completely signed off for 3.0 live"
Chad McKinney ex-Software Engineer 1y 6mo, Lead Gameplay Engineer 4mo, LA
So right now there's kind of two things I'm working on right now with PERSISTENCE. One is just general bug fixing, we've done a lot of work to get persistent behaviour into the game, persisting LOCATIONS, persistent INVENTORY, persisting items and port attachment and so on... Now that we're getting these FEATURES into the hands of the BACKERS and the EVOCATI we're starting to see some very RARE and HARD TO CATCH BUGS come in and so spending time tracking those things down, very rare..."
